It's a work of labor as much as debt and seer investigative powers. It covers every aspect of the Gulag system from its pre-history to its closing-down.

Russia's history is sad, unsentimental, and violent. One must thank God that Americans took a more noble and humane path for their history. If people get what they deserve, the Russians must be really wicked, and Americans must congratulate themselves.

Take these words from a Russian of today: "Perhaps the old system was bad -but at least we were powerful, we don't want to hear that it was bad." So will the devil himself say on the day of reckoning.

Bad people make bad systems. "The new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens lives on" says the author. Seems like Russia -and the rest of the world- is in for some more trouble soon.

One might wrongly assume that once through the first half of the book, the second will be just more of the same, but read on, it can always get worse.

Despite the huge amount of information it collects, it still does not cover the story of the "special exiles", millions of people who were sent not to concentration camps but to live in remote villages were they died of cold, starvation or overwork.

Gorky's description of the prisoners of the forced labor camps, and the kulaks: "half-animals". He and the other "intellectuals" were the ones most exhilarated by the "progress" of Soviet society!

What still amazes me most is the extreme of voluntary blindness that many Russian communists reached to explain away their own arrests and torture: "We are honest Soviet people, hurrah for Stalin, we aren't guilty and our state will free us from the company of all these enemies. Their arrests were caused by "the cunning work of foreign intelligence services".

With this kind of people abounding in your country what can anyone expect. Thank God, again and again, for America.

GULAG stands for GLAVNOE UPRAVLENIE LAGEREI. (p. XV). Instead of repeating other reviewers, let's clarify some issues. I am amused by the Communist apologist reviewers who insist that the Gulags held only common criminals. Other than being "enemies of the people", as defined by Communist ideology, what crimes did my mother, grandmother, and aunt commit?

Applebaum doesn't suggest that the Communists and Nazis were equally bad--quite the opposite. She softens the Gulags, relative to Nazi camps (pp. xxxiii-xxxix), by pointing to the fact that Gulag prisoners (e. g, the early-1940's Poles) could be rehabilitated, that the status of subject peoples changed over time, etc. In contrast, she asserts that Nazi policies towards Jews were universal, unchangeable, and guaranteeing their deaths. This is manifestly incorrect.

To begin with, although the Nazis were in power from 1933 to 1945, the systematic large-scale murders of Jews didn't begin until mid-1941. Second, Jews diverted from the gas chambers and into forced labor, while a minority, were hardly a "tiny number." They numbered in the few hundred thousands, of which a large fraction ended up surviving the war. Nor were the Jews spared or released an "unusual exception". Over 1,600 Jews were released by the Kastner-Eichmann deal, and tens of thousands of others were saved by getting diplomatic immunity. A million Jews could have been freed by the Nazis had the trucks-for-Jews deal not fallen through. Finally, entire classes of known Jews were in fact deliberately spared by the Nazis. These include the Schutzjuden (full-blooded German Jews relabeled Aryans), the Karaites, American and British POWs who were openly Jewish, and Finland's (Germany's ally) Jews.

Applebaum's statements about the changing status of incarcerated Poles (1941-1942) themselves need qualification. To begin with, unlike Stalin relative to the Poles, Hitler was never in a position in which his release of the Jews could have potentially staved off his impending defeat. Second, the Sikorski-Maisky Pact was actually insincere, and only a temporary expedient. While some incarcerated Poles got to leave the USSR, most Poles did not--something which Applebaum incorrectly attributes to the haste of Anders. (p. 453). There is no evidence that, even when the Red Army was on the ropes in late 1941, Stalin at any time intended to return Poland's eastern territories or respect Poland's sovereignty. Finally, as Applebaum herself notes (p. 300, 433, 465), no sooner had the Soviets re-entered Poland (1944) than they began sending Poles to the Gulags anew.

Most amazing of all, Applebaum asserts that: "Nevertheless, the Soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses--even if, at times, it did." (p. xxix). This would be news to the Nazis, who carefully studied the Gulag system in order to emulate it (see, for example, the Peczkis review of Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz). Other than the factors of time and efficiency, the Nazis didn't care if undesirables died from shooting or gassing, or from overwork and disease. If anything, Auschwitz Kommandant Hoess admired the "passive"-death forced-labor methods used by the Soviets to annihilate entire nationalities.

But why not kill ALL enemies immediately and completely? Applebaum comments: "Given the climate of the time, the cruelty of the war, and the presence, a few thousand kilometers to the west, of another planned genocide, some have wondered why Stalin did not simply murder the ethnic groups he so despised. My guess is that the destruction of cultures, but not of the peoples, suited his purposes better." (p. 430).

A haunting depiction of the Gulag. The text and photos were equally interesting. I was particularly fascinated by the scale of the Siberian wilderness depicted here.

This is an extremely well researched and superbly written book!

Author Anne Applebaum does a stellar job in discussing all aspects of the Soviet Union's notorious GULAG (concentration camps). She utilizes Russian archival sources and personalizes them with the memoirs of camp survivors as well as dozens and dozens of interviews.

According to Applebaum, almost 30 million Soviet citizens were arrested between 1930 and 1953 and sentenced to suffer in the GULAGs. Almost 3 million were executed. Many more were beaten to death or died from starvation, overwork, exposure, suicide and sickness.

Large numbers of common Soviet citizens were arrested and sentenced simply because the regime needed their particular expertise or their labor to better exploit the natural and mineral resources of the Soviet Union's remote northern and far eastern regions. Indeed, it was slave labor, on a massive scale, that transformed the Soviet Union through the large-scale construction of roads, bridges, towns, cities, and industry in the country's most remote regions.

The end result is an unparalleled look at life and death in Stalin's death camps. The GULAG forever scarred the souls of the tens of millions of Soviet (and non-Soviet) men, women, and children that survived their sentences and continues to influence everyday life in Putin's Russia.

"The old Stalinist division between "enemies" lives on in the new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens," concludes Applebaum. "Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia's citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today's northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running."

Anne Applebaum's deeply moving human document brushes a raw picture of an, unfortunately, often recurring human tragedy: the use of slave labor in `work' camps, here in their soviet version.
The Gulag system reflected the whole political and social climate in the USSR. The State was a big prison zone and the camps the small ones.
The system was an integral part of the soviet regime. Its role was to speed up industrialization and to excavate natural resources in barely habitable places. There were camps near gold, coal and nickel mines, near chemical, metal-processing, fish canning and electricity plants, near public works (airports, highways, water ways, apartment blocks) and that all over the country.

History
The gulag system was founded after the October 1917 revolution and came under the control of the secret service in 1929. Another pivotal year was 1937, the beginning of the Great Terror, when Stalin imposed quotas for indiscriminate arrests and executions beginning with the CP hierarchy. There was a partial amnesty during WW II, but the inmates were sent in the front line. After Stalin's death, the system was dismantled, but the camps continued to be used for common criminals and as `reeducation' centers for dissidents.

Who were the inmates?
There was always a mixture of common and `political' criminals.
In the beginning, the political inmates were `counter-revolutionaries', members of the non-Bolshevik revolutionary socialist parties. Afterwards, they were mostly peasants (after the collectivization), national minorities, CP and even Gulag officials (during the Great Terror), prisoners of war (during and after the war) and dissidents.
A total of about 30 million people passed through the camps, of which about 10 % died.

Why?
Except the common criminals, people were arrested for what they were, not for what they had done. Their - avowed or not - crimes were imaginary and nonsensical.

The system
Every camp has to be profitable; of course, they weren't.
They were generally run by dump and corrupt bureaucrats, who had absolutely no respect for individual lives. The working practices were very bad.
After three weeks people were turned into wild animals, fighting a naked struggle for survival in an overcrowded world of stench, vermin, filth, promiscuity, prostitution, epidemics, hunger, revolting food, informants, self-mutilation, murders, suicides, punishment cells, tortures and deaths by exhaustion. The `normal' inmates were terrorized by common criminal bands.
After release, the psychological and social integration into the big prison zone was extremely difficult.

Russia as a country has still not digested its past: `Society is indifferent to the crimes of the past, because so many people participated in them.' `Former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past.'

Anne Applebaum illustrates all aspects of Gulag life and its dehumanization process with moving tragic individual fates.
This book is a must read for all those interested in the history of mankind. `The more we are able to understand the specific circumstances which led to mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature.'

I can agree with much in what both the positive and negative reviews have said of this book. Personally, my problem with the book is that the author is either a sloppy researcher or is twisting information to suit her own needs.

To begin with, the information in the book is interesting, no doubt about it. A history of the GULag system, how it developed, who was behind some of the major activities that involved forced labor, orders, camp commandants, etc. Then there's life in the camps, also small chapters on arrests, interrogations, transport to camps, etc. All have information mainly from primary memoirs and recollections that have been published in English and Russian either by themselves or as part of an anthology. All of this is good and gives the reader an interesting view of the GULag.

The problem comes from the fact that indeed, instead of taking an objective view of the GULag system the author has a need to compare it to the Nazi system. Making comparisons here and there which really do not help but in fact muddle the issue. She will time and again go out of her way in the narrative to show how these camps differed from Nazi concentration camps but then again she is the only one who is making the comparison in her book. Also interesting to note is the fact that what happened to the majority of people, throughout practically the entire process, was based less so on state policy than on various variables one would encounter along the way; simply put, do you confess to your crimes? Have others confessed to you doing what you're accused of? Is there enough evidence against you? During what year were you arrested? Which camp were you sent to? How were you sent (via railroad, car, etc)? Who was the camp commandant at that point? Who were the guards? Was there a large criminal element? Were there many political prisoners? Were you in a solitary cell or a holding cell with dozens of people? And so on and so forth, any and all had the power to make your experiences in the camps that much better or worse.

Now, my biggest problem with the book is the fact that before I started it I had read an anthology about women who were in the GULag camps. The anthology included various extracts from their memoirs. At two points in Applebaum's book I ran across first a question on behalf one of these authors which should have been rather a statement and eventually found an incorrect paraphrasing which was used in the wrong context from the same anthology. To go over every endnote would take too much time so I am simply pointing out that something here isn't right. These changes are not simple and alter the entire meaning of what is being said which is why I feel a need to mention it. Since this book was fresh in my mind I easily recalled these instances and went back to check them finding out that indeed something was wrong when Applebaum transfered them to her own work. This is, again, a simple word of caution.

Personally, I think there are better works out there about the GULag, but this wouldn't be a horrible starting point.

Better than science fiction, if you want to expand your mind. The strength, wisdom, and authentic humanity of survivors shine through on every page.

When I saw the size of Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" (almost 600 pages), I thought I would just read a chapter here and there. The book makes it easy to do that. But I found myself reading all of it, and realize I will have to go back for it's "reality" to truly sink in. The human mind cannot take in such things easily. Nevertheless, my heart was knit with the survivors. And the least I can do for those who didn't survive is to seek to know their truth fully.

Don't go too quickly to any expert analyzers who attempt to explain away or justify this history. This book gives you a feeling that you are presented with the raw data of another world. First take it all in; then probe beyond it for answers to your more "objective" questions.

For anyone associated with the Soviet states to wish to forget or deny is perfectly human. Nevertheless those of us who can bear these memories must insist that the record be quickly and as completely as possible preserved. I myself hope to view the Memorialists' traveling exhibit in Washington D.C. in the summer of 2008, and urge everyone to find out when they may be coming to your area.

I stand at the other end of the political spectrum from Applebaum, but feel it's time for all shades of belief to face this history. As a liberal I am ashamed that ideological battles trumped our insistence on truth in all its weight. Ideology after all was part of the nexus out of which the terrors of the Soviet regime grew. It always trumped human beings, individual voices

To dismiss the voices of survivors is like telling a rape victim she cannot be believed--because she was there. In this case, however, over and over and over again the voices are corroborating each other. So even if you challenge details of individual voices, the overall truth comes through--and is authenticated by historical record. Too many puzzle pieces fit together too exactly.

Those who seek to dismiss all this as happening too long ago (20 years?!!), need to read Faulkner (or any other profound literary artist). Faulkner in writing about our identity and reality as Americans emphasized that the past is not dead, it's not even past. We need to open our eyes and see the truth, then we can understand the present and have hope for the future.

This book does not force conclusions. I myself am still studying this history --human history-- before I feel I can reach a place of understanding, a place for final conclusions. "Jesus wept" is about the only religious response I can come up with. And silent wonder.

Better than science fiction, if you want to expand your mind. The strength, wisdom, and authentic humanity of survivors shine through on every page.

When I saw the size of Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" (almost 600 pages), I thought I would just read a chapter here and there. The book makes it easy to do that. But I found myself reading all of it, and realize I will have to go back for it's "reality" to truly sink in. The human mind cannot take in such things easily. Nevertheless, my heart was knit with the survivors. And the least I can do for those who didn't survive is to seek to know their truth fully.

Don't go too quickly to any expert analyzers who attempt to explain away or justify this history. This book gives you a feeling that you are presented with the raw data of another world. First take it all in; then probe beyond it for answers to your more "objective" questions.

For anyone associated with the Soviet states to wish to forget or deny is perfectly human. Nevertheless those of us who can bear these memories must insist that the record be quickly and as completely as possible preserved. I myself hope to view the Memorialists' traveling exhibit in Washington D.C. in the summer of 2008, and urge everyone to find out when they may be coming to your area.

I stand at the other end of the political spectrum from Applebaum, but feel it's time for all shades of belief to face this history. As a liberal I am ashamed that ideological battles trumped our insistence on truth in all its weight. Ideology after all was part of the nexus out of which the terrors of the Soviet regime grew. It always trumped human beings, individual voices

To dismiss the voices of survivors is like telling a rape victim she cannot be believed--because she was there. In this case, however, over and over and over again the voices are corroborating each other. So even if you challenge details of individual voices, the overall truth comes through--and is authenticated by historical record. Too many puzzle pieces fit together too exactly.

Those who seek to dismiss all this as happening too long ago (20 years?!!), need to read Faulkner (or any other profound literary artist). Faulkner in writing about our identity and reality as Americans emphasized that the past is not dead, it's not even past. We need to open our eyes and see the truth, then we can understand the present and have hope for the future.

This book does not force conclusions. I myself am still studying this history --human history-- before I feel I can reach a place of understanding, a place for final conclusions. "Jesus wept" is about the only religious response I can come up with. And silent wonder.

The fundamental problem with this book is the author herself. To start with, Anne Applebaum is not even a historian. Instead she is a hack journalist of the right-wing liberal tendency cheerleading the imperialist policies of America while writing slanderous pieces on Russia because its president is not a lapdog of the west in the vein of his predecessor. One such example is provided by the "Washington Post" where Applebaum contributed a diatribe titled "Skip St. Petersburg, Mr. Bush". She demonstrates a lack of respect for Russia and uses the G8 meeting to slander Putin and attack his policies.

Applebaum has an ideological agenda to push demonstrated by the polemicist introduction in which she rehashes the discredited argument that communism is equivalent to fascism: "All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika. None objected to wearing a hammer and sickle on a t-shirt." Although it doesn't occur to Applebaum, this premise is discredited by the major role of communists in the history of the anti-fascist movement. If anything is comparable to fascism it would be the vulgar right-wing liberal trend espoused by Applebaum with its staunch anti-communism. Like the Nazis, Applebaum who contributes to the bourgeois newspaper "Economist" represents the interests of the reactionary strata of the capitalist class: Germany's wealthiest capitalists--the Krupps, Thyssens, Kirkdorfs, etc funded the Nazi Party for nearly a decade.

In a chapter titled "Bolshevik Beginnings", Applebaum tries to trace the development of correctional labor following the October Revolution. But there was nothing extraordinary about the Soviet correctional labor facilities in the context of Russia or elsewhere.By 1914 there were hundreds of thousands of prisoners in Russia. Many Bolshevik had suffered under Tsarist repression. Up to the late 19th century, England banished more than 150 thousand people to Australia to work in labor colonies. The first concentration camps were founded not in Soviet Russia, but in Spanish Cuba and British South Africa. Even during the Russian civil war, the use of concentration camps was introduced by the white regime in Finland that interned 100 thousand workers in concentration camps and executed another 10 thousand in January-May 1918. Tracing to the Romanov dynasty, forced labor was used to build the city of Saint Petersburg, ports, canals, and roads. Convicts worked in state mines and plants in the Urals and Siberia (for instance, the Nerchinsk hard labor zone). Beginning in the 1890s forced labor was used to construct the Siberian railroad and later the Amur railroad. The Soviet labor camps had achieved productive results smiliar to these with the construction of the Moscow Metro and Moscow State University; the Norilsk Combinat, constructed by the Gulag, today produces a substantial share of the world's output of platinum and nickel. Given this context, a lengthy propaganda piece on Soviet labor camps is superfluous. With the Cold War having ended nearly twenty years ago, Applebaum seems to be stuck in the past.

By calling Soviet correctional labor acilities concentration camps, Applebaum implies that hardened criminals in Russia convicted of crimes punishable in any society were treated in a manner comparable to Auschwitz. This premise is flawed for numerous reasons. Unlike with the Nazi extermination camps which Applebaum offensively compares to the Soviet correctional labor facilities, there was no intent on the part of the Soviet government to harm the prisoners. The Soviet labor system was oriented towards keeping its labor force in adequate condition for hard work in order to fulfil construction plans handed down from above. Camp managers had a stake in keeping workers healthy so that their plans could be met. In fact, workers' work was regulated according to the state of their health: healthy workers were assigned to heavy physical work; workers with minor deficiencies were used in medium-heavy work; workers with pronounced physical deficiencies and diseases were assigned to light physical work and individual physical work; prisoners with severe physical deficiencies were assigned to the disabled category. In the 1930s, the government issued numerous orders to ensure the provision of adequate levels of food, clothing, and living conditions, and seeked to enforce limits imposed on the exploitation of prison labor by legislation. In the labor camps, motivation systems were directed at the fulfilment of work norms. Norm overfulfilment led to increased benefits. Brigades achieving good work results were rewarded with better rations, better clothing, and the right to buy goods in the camp store. They received monetary rewards, the right to send money to relatives, the right to receive packages without restrictions, or to be transferred to more qualified work. Prisoners working according to Stakhanovite measures enjoyed additional privileges such as better living quarters, special rations, a separate dining room, first access to books or newspapers in the camp library, or the best seating in the camp theatre. In the Norilsk camp in 1950, the average wage per worker credited as cash was about 225 rubles. Prisoners in Norilsk received about one-third the pay of the lowest-paid civilian workers, although they did receive free housing and food. There were measures implemented to ensure the well-being of workers. For 1940 alone, the authorities granted the White Sea-Baltic camp more than 2000 hospital beds. Like with the entire Soviet population, life became hard for the workers during the war. The majority of fatalities in the Gulag occurred in the period 1941-43 when the country faced extreme hardships. When the Gulag reached its peak in 1952, the death rate was a mere 6 per 1000. This did not deviate significantly from the Soviet population as a whole.

Applebaum unsuccessfully argues that the Soviet correctional labor facilities qualified as concentration camps because people were imprisoned on the basis of their identity rather than their actions. Basic archival data on the number of criminal sentences refutes this. According to the declassified archives, the vast majority of workers in the camps were convicted of non-political crimes including systematic crimes against persons and property, hooliganism, banditry, and misconduct in office. Applebaum dismisses these facts: "A woman who has picked a few pieces of grain from a field is not a criminal, nor is a man who has been late to work." Baselessly, Applebaum claims that the number of genuine professional criminals was "tiny"(p.582). In the mid 1950s, both political and ordinary offenders were released from labor camps. Upon re-entry into Soviet society, criminals then found it possible to cultivate a younger generation of professionals. Crime grew steadily throughout the 60s and 70s and continued to climb in the 80s. The average annual rate of growth of crime in the USSR in the period 1956-1991 was 5 per cent, wheras the population growth grew by only 1 per cent. This means that the crime rate grew more rapidly than the population. Reports and personal testimony show that corruption in the USSR was prevalent. Typically, bureaucrats would embezzle state property without being punished for it. Considering the prevalence of corruption in the USSR, Applebaum's implication that something as petty as picking berries would result in a prison sentence is far-fetched. The approach Applebaum takes can be used to argue that there are no legitimate criminals in America's prisons: someone found guilty of car theft is not a legitimate criminal but is instead repressed by the inhumane capitalist system that necessitates theft. Applebaum's analysis of crime in Soviet Russia is one-sided and lacks any factual basis. Few, if any, criminologists share Applebaum's belief that ordinary crime did not exist in Soviet Russia. Applebaum is not in a position of competence to even analyze the subject.

Applebaum makes the allegation that the declassified NKVD archives on the labor camps contain unreliable data: "camp commanders had a vested interest in lying about how many of their prisoners died"(p.583). Applebaum does not understand the data in concern. The Soviet correctional labor department was complex and required an extensive record-keeping system to operate. The managers of the labor camps needed a set of accounting data to plan their work. The central leadership of the Communist Party required periodic reports from the NKVD on developments in the camps, and on the policing of criminal operations. In their time these official records were kept in the appropriate secret archives of the NKVD and Communist Party leadership. These secret accounting materials should not be confused with the non-secret materials published at the time. Western writers who consider that all these data were manipulated 60 years ago, and then held in secret to disinform them, suffer from an exaggeration of their own importance. When officials were pleading for more supplies they had no incentive to underestimate the number of prisoners. When officials were planning production they needed to know the real number of prisoners. Their health departments needed to know how many were dying. When two different generations of MVD officials were briefing Khrushchev on the iniquities of their predecessors, in their top security reports, they had more to lose than to gain by distorting the data. There are no intrinsic grounds for presuming that these archival indicators are greatly underestimated.

Applebaum speculates that a great number of prisoners were released when on the verge of dying. She puts forth no substantial evidence to back up this claim. The data that she tries to discredit does not have any implausible elements. In the 1930s, the death rate was about two to three higher in the labor camps compared to the Soviet population as a whole. It greatly increased due to the hardships of the war and then sunk to a level on par with the rest of the Soviet population. Contrary to Applebaum's confusion, archival data from the NKVD shows that roughly half of all sentences for political crimes did not exceed five years. Often, these sentences were commuted. Large numbers of workers were released from the correctional labor camps not because they were about to die but simply because their brief term ended.

Applebaum's amateurish history on the Soviet correctional labor camps contains scant original research. It relies primarily on Russian language memoir accounts of people with a biased outlook on the topic. When trying to gather facts and objectively analyze history, scholars do not rely on subjective memoir accounts for evidence. Memoirs and diaries are unsuitable for the analysis of history. They only reveal people's judgments about themselves and their environment. There are plenty of objective, scholarly accounts of the Soviet correctional labor system.

i read the rave reviews and i bought this book as a result. if you want to know every detail about the gulags, buy this book. if not, don't. too much detail for me. the first third was interesting but found that i could not keep going. writing style too flat; this is more like a dissertation.

great book, if you like human suffering and graphic details of rape, starvation, extortion,gross abuse of human rights, disease, famine, hypothermia, Jews, Stalin, death, pretty much the worst human tragedies in the worlds history, next to the Cambodian killing fields and Rwanda/Hutu/Tutsis. If you want disturbed sleep and wild dreams/nightmares this is the book for you. Better than a snuff film, more graphic than zombie films and more stimulating than bondage films. A++

Anne Applebaum's Gulag knocked my wind out. This report of the single most evil thing that humanity has managed to do to itself is by far the most horrible and upsetting account I have ever read.

Like a doctor who must tell a patient that the latter has contracted incurable cancer, Anne Applebaum informs the reader in a mostly matter-of-fact but with obvious and deep empathy about the horror and madness that has kept much of Europe and most of Asia in darkness for decades: the Soviet Gulag system and the spirit of fear, betrayal, indifference and randomness (Russian Roulette-ness) that it produced.

"Properly speaking, the Gulag belongs to the history of the Soviet Union; to the international as well as the Russian history of prisons and exile; and to the particular intellectual climate of continental Europe in the mid-twentieth century, which also produced the Nazi concentration camps in Germany."

But what strikes is the relentless waste and inertness of the whole Gulag monstrosity. It wasn't generated by war or resentment but purely by a faulty philosophy, coerced obedience to it and executing its impossible demands. Countless millions of human lives were destroyed by uninformed folks who were simply given a gun and place on a fence. There were sadists who found themselves in remote places, in control of herds of nameless phantoms without rights. Inmates were beaten to pulp, starved, forced to work so gruelingly that many hacked off their own hands for a few days of rest. And many of these had been respectable citizens with no criminal intend whatsoever. Members of your family could simply disappear and become one of the living dead in a camp somewhere. Applebaum tells stories that stuck to this reader's mind like visions. "The strange social hierarchies of the Soviet camp system meant that women were tortured and humiliated to an extent unusual even for a prison system."

A few times Applebaum almost apologizes for not having answers to the most pressing question of why a government would do a thing like that to its own people, and then when the system is obviously failing, go on for decades more. Look at a globe and check for yourself how huge a landmass was afflicted by these rabid acts of inactivity, by this fanatical torpidity.

"Reading [certain reports], one can have no doubt that the Gulag bosses in Moscow knew--really and truly knew--what life was like in the camps. [] In the end, nobody forced guards to rescue the young and murder the old. Nobody forced camp commanders to kill off the sick. Nobody forced the Gulag bosses in Moscow to ignore the implications of inspector's reports. Yet such decisions were made openly, every day, by guards and administrators apparently convinced that they had the right to make them."

After thorough and very well written analyses of the origins of the Gulag, life and work in the camps, and its slow down-fall towards its undoing, Applebaum epilogizes on memory and memorial. She notices how little is done in the sense of museums or memorial sites and how nobody seems to want to talk about the issue. Maybe that will still happen.

For now Anne Applebaum's study of the Gulag must stand among very few studies of its caliber. Both a tribute to the victims and a landmark for their posterity, this book must be read by everyone. We owe it to the victims but also to ourselves and to our children. These events must teach us about our own identity and our capabilities, lest it happens again in some way or other.

A personal note on why memorials may be so scarce:

The Second World War had been concluded twenty-two years prior to my birth in Ridderkerk, the Netherlands, but I remember growing up with that war as with memories as fresh as last night's dreams. The atrocities were still discussed. There were yearly liberation fests and days of remembering the fallen. There were books and documentaries, statues and memorials. We played in abandoned bunkers, not cowboys and Indians, but us versus the Germans.
Now that I am forty, I realize what a very short time twenty-two years is. For a nation, it is impossible to forget even the smallest details of a rape that took five years to unfold.

When I moved to Poland--according to Applebaum "the country which supplied so many hundreds of thousands of prisoners for Soviet camps and exile villages"--communism had ended fifteen years earlier. The countries of the former Soviet Block suffered a rape that lasted ten times as long as the German occupancy of the Netherlands and it hasn't been over long enough to view the consequences objectively and without either the blood boiling indignation or languid apathy of any rape victim. A nation can not be asked to remember something that can not yet be forgotten, especially since rapist and victim must remain adjacent, and also because "in December 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, thirteen of the fifteen former Soviet republics were run by former communists..."

The people of the former Soviet Block have been worked over in any possible way: they have been killed, maimed, stolen from, humiliated and kept paralyzed with the fear of the double mortality of death AND exile. No neighbor or family member could be trusted. There simply was no relief. There was no oasis. The maddening injustice resulted in bitterness and habitual mistrust. It will take one or two generations to outgrow the trauma and to look upon the Soviet era as past. Then, when people will regain the courage to acknowledge their history, works like Anne Applebaum's Gulag will be found a treasure.

Today we see mature capitalism having a wild go at an infant democracy, and the suffocating grip of commerce squeezes the people dry of their last drips of dignity. The run for the money has amassed the momentum of a steam roller, and the weak are getting left behind. And the Gulag? We receive startling reports of work camps in the west where Polish kids are made to work too many hours, put to rest in unheated shacks, shot or raped if they refuse to work or want to go home. Huge and untouchable countries that can still afford it, still pronounce war on the invisible 'enemy of the state' and build secret prisons on newly allied ground such as our beloved Poland. Auschwitz is a mere two hour car trip away from my home. SS, KGB, CIA, what's the difference?

Anne Applebaum's Gulag knocked my wind out. This report of the single most evil thing that humanity has managed to do to itself is by far the most horrible and upsetting account I have ever read.

Like a doctor who must tell a patient that the latter has contracted incurable cancer, Anne Applebaum informs the reader in a mostly matter-of-fact but with obvious and deep empathy about the horror and madness that has kept much of Europe and most of Asia in darkness for decades: the Soviet Gulag system and the spirit of fear, betrayal, indifference and randomness (Russian Roulette-ness) that it produced.

"Properly speaking, the Gulag belongs to the history of the Soviet Union; to the international as well as the Russian history of prisons and exile; and to the particular intellectual climate of continental Europe in the mid-twentieth century, which also produced the Nazi concentration camps in Germany."

But what strikes is the relentless waste and inertness of the whole Gulag monstrosity. It wasn't generated by war or resentment but purely by a faulty philosophy, coerced obedience to it and executing its impossible demands. Countless millions of human lives were destroyed by uninformed folks who were simply given a gun and place on a fence. There were sadists who found themselves in remote places, in control of herds of nameless phantoms without rights. Inmates were beaten to pulp, starved, forced to work so gruelingly that many hacked off their own hands for a few days of rest. And many of these had been respectable citizens with no criminal intend whatsoever. Members of your family could simply disappear and become one of the living dead in a camp somewhere. Applebaum tells stories that stuck to this reader's mind like visions. "The strange social hierarchies of the Soviet camp system meant that women were tortured and humiliated to an extent unusual even for a prison system."

A few times Applebaum almost apologizes for not having answers to the most pressing question of why a government would do a thing like that to its own people, and then when the system is obviously failing, go on for decades more. Look at a globe and check for yourself how huge a landmass was afflicted by these rabid acts of inactivity, by this fanatical torpidity.

"Reading [certain reports], one can have no doubt that the Gulag bosses in Moscow knew--really and truly knew--what life was like in the camps. [] In the end, nobody forced guards to rescue the young and murder the old. Nobody forced camp commanders to kill off the sick. Nobody forced the Gulag bosses in Moscow to ignore the implications of inspector's reports. Yet such decisions were made openly, every day, by guards and administrators apparently convinced that they had the right to make them."

After thorough and very well written analyses of the origins of the Gulag, life and work in the camps, and its slow down-fall towards its undoing, Applebaum epilogizes on memory and memorial. She notices how little is done in the sense of museums or memorial sites and how nobody seems to want to talk about the issue. Maybe that will still happen.

For now Anne Applebaum's study of the Gulag must stand among very few studies of its caliber. Both a tribute to the victims and a landmark for their posterity, this book must be read by everyone. We owe it to the victims but also to ourselves and to our children. These events must teach us about our own identity and our capabilities, lest it happens again in some way or other.

A personal note on why memorials may be so scarce:

The Second World War had been concluded twenty-two years prior to my birth in Ridderkerk, the Netherlands, but I remember growing up with that war as with memories as fresh as last night's dreams. The atrocities were still discussed. There were yearly liberation fests and days of remembering the fallen. There were books and documentaries, statues and memorials. We played in abandoned bunkers, not cowboys and Indians, but us versus the Germans.
Now that I am forty, I realize what a very short time twenty-two years is. For a nation, it is impossible to forget even the smallest details of a rape that took five years to unfold.

When I moved to Poland--according to Applebaum "the country which supplied so many hundreds of thousands of prisoners for Soviet camps and exile villages"--communism had ended fifteen years earlier. The countries of the former Soviet Block suffered a rape that lasted ten times as long as the German occupancy of the Netherlands and it hasn't been over long enough to view the consequences objectively and without either the blood boiling indignation or languid apathy of any rape victim. A nation can not be asked to remember something that can not yet be forgotten, especially since rapist and victim must remain adjacent, and also because "in December 2001, on the tenth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, thirteen of the fifteen former Soviet republics were run by former communists..."

The people of the former Soviet Block have been worked over in any possible way: they have been killed, maimed, stolen from, humiliated and kept paralyzed with the fear of the double mortality of death AND exile. No neighbor or family member could be trusted. There simply was no relief. There was no oasis. The maddening injustice resulted in bitterness and habitual mistrust. It will take one or two generations to outgrow the trauma and to look upon the Soviet era as past. Then, when people will regain the courage to acknowledge their history, works like Anne Applebaum's Gulag will be found a treasure.

Today we see mature capitalism having a wild go at an infant democracy, and the suffocating grip of commerce squeezes the people dry of their last drips of dignity. The run for the money has amassed the momentum of a steam roller, and the weak are getting left behind. And the Gulag? We receive startling reports of work camps in the west where Polish kids are made to work too many hours, put to rest in unheated shacks, shot or raped if they refuse to work or want to go home. Huge and untouchable countries that can still afford it, still pronounce war on the invisible 'enemy of the state' and build secret prisons on newly allied ground such as our beloved Poland. Auschwitz is a mere two hour car trip away from my home. SS, KGB, CIA, what's the difference?

This is a very good book, that is never dry. It is very informative, and it really describes all aspects of the Gulags (not that I'm a historian). However, it is a bit long

This is a fantastic piece of scholarship. Applebaum has provided a huge service to the historiography of the Soviet genocide. It is both gruesome and horrifying but these are stories that need to be told not merely for the sake of history but for the sake of Russia today. It is all the more important however because there still remain Western scholars who attempt to downplay or even deny the very existence of the Soviet slave labor camps and the number of victims. Those theories are firmly discredited by
Applebaum, who relies on survivor memoirs and official Soviet government documents to demonstrate the extent and brutality of the Russian regime. The fact that Moscow did not have extermination camps has by many been used as an argument that they were not as bad as the Nazis. Of course comparison of genocides is nothing more than an exercise in futility. The difference one could argue was that if you were to be executed in the Soviet Union they didn't bother with camps. Instead they, much like Nazi Einsatzgruppen, executed you on the spot. Unfortunately points like that have been used by deniers to claim that the Soviet Union was not an evil regime. Applebaum has done a fantastic job at destroying that leftist fantasy.

For anyone who wonders why Russia is the mess it is today--notwithstanding the glam and glitz of the many post-Soviet Union robber barons--Anne Applebaum provides instructive clues in her sensational book, "Gulag," which explores one of the most horrendous of all systems in Joseph Stalin's Russia. The "Gulag," where upwards of 30 million largely innocent people were insanely targeted by Stalin and his henchmen as political "conspirators." They were then seized, jailed for little or no reason, and then either executed or forced to live and work under some of the most abominable conditions on record. Indeed, Stalin's Gulag did more to kill social, political, intellectual and even artistic vibrancy than any war ever could. The seeds planted during Stalin's long reign have yielded a latter-day Russia that is steeped in corruption, saddled with a notoriously disfunctional public sector that exposes appalling disparities between the rich and the poor. Unlike many "dry" history books, "Gulag" is immensely readable, thanks to Applebaum's brisk writing style and her profound interest in her subject matter, which is contagious. A masterful narrative with exhaustively detailed footnotes, "Gulag" bears stunning testament to the human cost of totalitarianism. It's a must-have for European history buffs!

I can say I have read about 95% of the books published in English and in French on the gulag and this one is more like an anthology than anything else. It is thorough, clear and understandable by anyone. It will make the reader appreciate his or her life one (or two) step further. We are lucky to live in our protected world and reading this book just helps us enjoy our beautiful life a lot more. Two Thumbs UP!

Its a question you almost find yourself asking when reading this excellent account that has become an instant classic. The story of the system of Soviet concentration camps is a long and ultimately terrifying one. Begun by Lenin, the Gulag expanded until it reached its peak under Joseph Stalin around 1950. It came to enslave and imprison millions of people, and would lead to the deaths of millions as well. The Gulag would eventually disappear, but its legacy lives on its its countless victims. Today it stands a blood-soaked testament to the horror that was communism. "Gulag: A History" won the Pulitzer prize for the author, and quite deservingly so. The book is excellent in all respects, and should be required reading when it comes to 20th century history.

I can't add to the sentiments of the serious scholars who've praised this book. But what made "Gulag" so special for me is the personal insight that the author generates from official documents, prisoner journals, survivor interviews, and her own visits. You're placed right there in the house of horrors -- starving, exhausted, fearful every day for years on end. I read 1-3 chapters each night before bed, and I dreamed about the book.

This is an excellent, comprehensive story of the Soviet Gulag camp system from the 1920s through the 1980s. Applebaum drew extensively on Soviet archival research and on prisoner memoirs to write "Gulag." The product is a well-written, interesting history of an evil system.

At the beginning of "Gulag," Applebaum wrote that the catalyst for this work was the realization that, while most people universally abhor Nazi symbols, people collect Soviet symbols and trinkets as souvenirs. Everyone knows about the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, but few people know about the evils that were perpetrated by Soviet communism in the Gulag system. Ms. Applebaum successfully shows the evil, demoralizing Gulag system.

The book is organized into three sections: the first tells the chronological history of the early (pre-World War II) years of the Gulag; the second gives a topical overview of life in the camps; and the third traces the history of the camps from World War II through the death of Stalin and to their complete demise in the 1980s. Chapters in the second part focus on the arrests, imprisonment and interrogation, work and life, women and children, and even rebellion and escape in the camps. Applebaum shows the breadth and depth of the system, and by relying on a wide variety of memoirs, shows that for every generalization she can draw about life for the millions in the camps, there were always exceptions. She also shows how much of the impetus for the camps was economic - the Soviet leaders believed that the camps were producing more than they were costing - but that this belief, like the overall Soviet system, was built on a foundation of manipulated figures and outright lies.

Readers already familiar with the Gulag through books such as "The Gulag Archipelago" will not be surprised by anything in this book. But Applebaum's book, drawing on such a wide variety of sources, gives a more complete picture of the huge Gulag system throughout its entire existence.

Although Anne Applebaum's account of the origins and rise of the Soviet GULag system contains little new archival information, it is certain to remain the standard account of the subject for some time to come. The book is well-organized, clearly written, and perfectly suited for readers already familiar with the outlines of Soviet history who want a single volume history of the USSR's murderous prison camp system.

I liked Applebaum's book, first of all, for clearly systematizing the vast GULAG - related materials available to date. And even though the book is emotionally difficult to read, the clarity of Applebaum's style and her obvious empathy with the material help along. In addition, I have always especially valued authors' own response to the subjects of their books, which is rather rare in non-fiction. Refreshingly, in the introduction and the last few chapters, Applebaum offers her own take on issues ranging from the number of GULAG prisoners to the unfortunate lack of awareness about GULAG today.

But no less important, and unfortunately not sufficiently explored in this clever and factual book, is a consideration of the human condition, aided perhaps by historic and cultural circumstance, that led to the mushrooming of this vast and atrocious system. Applebaum starts tackling the issue by suggesting that the main reason behind GULAG's existence was economic benefit. Stalin believed in slave labor. The country had vast natural resources in the climatically harsh remote regions, that it vitally needed for rapid economic growth. Hence the system of concentration camps that delivered both. This convincing explanation seems, however, incomplete. It does not account for the guard that would not let literally dying of thirst prisoners collect rainwater into their mugs, nor for the commissars working day and night wringing confessions in non-existing crimes from hundreds of thousands of innocent people, nor does it account for the repression of the families of those labeled "enemies of the people". Applebaum admits that many such workings of the Soviet State are hard to understand.

The fish rots from the head. Undoubtedly, Stalin himself was the engine of much atrocity. His values are well represented by his 1937 messages to local NKVD in which he specified the percentages of each province population he wanted dead. Stalin's monstrous bent on mass murder may be a part of his character with which he was born. Or he may have developed it as overcompensation for his physical shortcomings and lack of talents. But it seems that this unrestrained evil blossomed because of the policies of the Russian State at the time. These policies appear to be the main building blocks of GULAG.

The sprawling GULAG system, with thousands of camps and some 18 million people that passed through it, could not have existed if it were not an inherent part of the State. The system of Russian concentration camps was started before Stalin got to the helm (with over 100 camps in 1920, when Lenin was alive and well), and operated well after Stalin's death (until 1986). Soviet Russia defined itself as the product of class struggle. The idea of history as class struggle, proposed by Marx, became the country's new religion. Moreover, not only was this theory used to explain history, but the country's new history was made according to this theory: class struggle had to be created and perpetuated to prove the wisdom of the dogma. Marx and Lenin laid the groundwork for this process by claiming that vast groups of people had to be declared enemies of the workers and peasants according to the new sociological law they uncovered. The new Soviet State was quite imaginative in choosing the subsections of the population to declare enemies: relatively better-off peasants, foreigners, minorities, people who were late for work etc. When they ran out of obvious choices, they just invented numerous "plots" and "spy networks" and tortured false confessions out of innocent people (acting on the State doctrine that confession trumps all evidence and on Stalin's 1937 memo approving torture). Dealing with individuals that were unpleasant to the state was disarmingly simple: it was sufficient to label someone as part of an "enemy" group. Then the conviction followed automatically based on the state dogma. Declaring a group to be hostile to the Soviet social order and an individual to be part of that group was at the heart of the Soviet State and followed directly from the cornerstone of Marxism.

GULAG could not have existed without the spirit of intolerance to "others", fanned by the Party rhetoric. Lenin, rabidly intolerant of any disagreement with his own views, openly called for being ruthless to the enemies of Bolsheviks. He believed in terror. Robespierre was his hero and NKVD was his guillotine. Intolerance and ruthlessness were at the heart of GULAG's development into the system of slave labor and death, and formed the basis for the repression of the inmates' families.

GULAG could not have existed without great indifference to human suffering and disregard for human life on the part of authorities. Perhaps, in part it was a natural occurrence in the society that operated in larger than life slogans ("The Party and People are One") and in which individual was always secondary to the plans of "the Party and the State". The country's ideals were inanimate notions (such as "Socialist Labor" or "Bright Future") An individual life was never one of them.

GULAG could not have existed in a country with any semblance of a legal system. Until 1922, the new Soviet Russia did not even have a Criminal Code. And in 1937, the chief law officer of the USSR, Vyshinsky, argued that prosecutors should not feel limited by the letter of law, or even by their intellect, but should use their "party intuition" to detect the enemy. Usually, there were no investigations or hearings. Until 1938, the person was sentenced by a "troika" (which was presided by the chief of the local NKVD), without as much as pretence of a due process.

GULAG could not have existed without collaboration of tens of thousands of people. Propaganda played a big role in recruiting them. Bolsheviks knew the value of propaganda. One of the main reasons that they got to power in 1917 was their use of propaganda to cajole Russian solders to join them. Their high regard for propaganda led them to outlaw all opposition press only two days after they succeeded in the military coup. The new Soviet State gave the world dictionaries the word "agitprop" and with it the idea of the propaganda party offices throughout the country. In addition, GULAG's administration and support personnel were not trained in critical thinking: for example, in 1945 75% of them had no education beyond primary school. They presented a greenfield material for the State propaganda.

The book does not have the immediacy of the first-hand experience or the liveliness of GULAG Archipelago, but is an engaging and systematic overview of what we know about GULAG today.

Very briefly, this book does a very good job of covering the entire history of the old gulag (a new one is on the horizon, with the resurrection of Putin-lead Soviet Russia) without being overbearing in the amount of material presented. The coverage of such topics as Americans in the Gulag and the very large Ukrainian presence in the Gulag is excellent.

I think this book is well written. Every chapter is devoted to one subject. I keep thinking to myself, how did this happen? Why did so many have to die in Stalin's madness? How did the west not know?

This Book is very good at describing the details of the Gulag, and its history in general. It lacks behind in a few areas though, areas which are very critical. The Numbers.
The Numbers in this book are about the bottom rock low you can use. 30 Million passed through? The best numbers indicate At Least 10 Million DIED, Not 2 Million, Unless she means just in the certain time period of collectization or such, but total throughout stalin's whole reign, the numbers are much higher, with many million more passing through. The Numbers are clearly very low, but that is partialy due to the Extreme lack of any evidence left in this world, and can only be use by the assumption of partial evidence, which is what the soviets WANTED You to see, with all the dreadful documents about the most dreadful parts being burned in WW2 while the Russians retreated from Ukraine and Russia while the Germans advanced, and the archives were annihlated in order to prevent the passing of the dark knowledge into the people.

This Book is very good at describing the details of the Gulag, and its history in general. It lacks behind in a few areas though, areas which are very critical. The Numbers.
The Numbers in this book are about the bottom rock low you can use. 30 Million passed through? The best numbers indicate 40 Million DIED, with many million more passing through. The Numbers are clearly very low, but that is partialy due to the Extreme lack of any evidence left in this world, and can only be use by the assumption of partial evidence, which is what the soviets WANTED You to see, with all the dreadful documents about the most dreadful parts being burned in WW2 while the Russians retreated from Ukraine and Russia while the Germans advanced, and the archives were annihlated in order to prevent the passing of the dark knowledge into the people.

In the history of the XX Century, at least as seen from the "Euro-centric" point of view, there were two great evils. One was Nazism, the other one was - Communism. Unlike Nazism, however, the general perception of Communism was, and still remains today, ambivalent. So often we hear of a "great socialist idea gone wrong". Indeed, for a reader of Marx or Engels the Communism may seem very attractive remedy for the wrongs of a Capitalistic society. Yet the social and political revolution, so essential to "Marxism-Leninism", through dyctature inescapably leads to terror where the goals fully justify the means and all of the sudden killing or otherwise "eliminating" entire social classes of people, e.g. individual farmers ("kulaks") becomes a small price to pay on the altar of building "society of social justice and equality".

Anne Applebaum with her new work, through the analysis of the forced labor camp system, does a superb job of presenting Communism, especially Stalinism, , in the right perspective. It was an evil entirely on a par with Nazism, if not even worse. Only the confusion around the "theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism" and the fact that atrocities of the Soviet system had "domestic", if you will, character and were largely hidden from the plain view of a "Western eye" made this false perception possible. It has to be changed and this book is a great contribution to this end.

Having read so many laudatory comments from the fellow readers I can't possibly come up with anything new to commend this book. It is indeed the most comprehensive, most synthetic and most in-depth depiction and analysis of the Soviet forced labor camp system, the best since the famous "Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

But I would add another reading recommendation, a book that was, as far as I can tell, the first to describe and analyze experience of living in the Gulag beyond just a memoir, one that any careful reader of this work will instantly recognize for Anne Applebaum acknowledges it as one of the main bibliographical sources and quotes from it very extensively. It is "World Apart" by Gustav Herling. Himself a Gulag prisoner and survivor Herling put his experiences of living in a forced labor camp on paper shortly after the WWII and published in 1951 in England. Unlike the voluminous works by Solzhenitsyn and Applebaum this one is relatively short and concise. And it is written in such a literary manner that it captivates reader completely, making him feel as if he were right there himself experiencing on his own skin the horrors of Gulag and seeing in his own eyes what can happen to a human being under such extreme circumstances.

One of the main thesis of Applebaum's work is that to understand the essence of the Soviet concentration camps one needs to treat it as a part of the history of the Soviet Union: "...the Gulag did not emerge, fully formed, from the sea, but rather reflected the general standards of the society around it. If the camps were filthy, if the guards were brutal (...) that was partly because filthiness and brutality (...) were plentiful in other spheres of Soviet life."

This point can and, in my view, needs to be taken one step further. For the history of the Soviet Union is a part of a still broader history of Russia itself. In this context another book comes to my mind. One by the Marquis de Custine: "Journey For Our Time". First published in France in 1843, it describes impressions of a French traveler (de Custine himself) to Czarist Russia in 1839 then ruled by Nicholas I. "The basic resemblances between the military and despotic rule of Nicholas I (...) and the absolutism of the Soviet regime are unmistakable". Indeed, one is left with a profound impression of how little changed between Czarist Russia and Bolshevik Soviet Union. This impression will, no doubt, be only further reinforced after reading another masterpiece, I highly recommend, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground".

The average person does not know about the Russian Gulags and the millions it killed. As Applebaum points out, it is a forgotten holocaust that continued many years after the Nazis.

Applebaum give a comprehensive outline of the dynamic Russian political landscape and how it affected the Gulags and then peppers it with eye witness accounts of prisoners who were being directly affected by the governments policy at the time.

This really is an eye opener. Nazi genocide seemed so much simpler compared to the reasons Stalinist Communism could send you to a Gulag for. I couldnt help but think of Orwells big brother, double speak and the thought police when reading Appelbaums book.

The significance of history is only through what is remembered. There definitely needs to be more written about this important piece of history.

As a lay person wishing to know more, I was drawn to this book because it spelled out some things which need to be remembered. The value of history is that we learn from it but the learning stops when people close their eyes and minds to important information. Abuse of human beings is nothing new in world history but this book opens an area not previously exposed to the general public. As I write these words I have in front of me stories of great abuse that continue today in N. Korea. Knowing more about the Gulag is but the first step toward seeing that it doesn't happen again. Applebaum has done a fine job in helping to expose such awful events.

Reading this book was a fitting way to end my two years of living in Russia. Though it focuses on one specific aspect of Russian 20th century history - the labor camp system - it in many ways is a broader history of the inherent flaws of the Soviet Union and its cruelty. While it is a brutal condemnation of one of the most oppressive regimes of all time, and while it lays plenty of blame on contemporary Russian society and government for not taking more seriously their shameful past, this is by no means a book that is hateful towards Russia. Indeed, it is clear that the author cares greatly about this country and its people. And exposing in great detail the horrors of its past is, I think, an exercise in tough love.

This book truly does present a comprehensive history of the Gulag system. Usually when I finish a work of non-fiction I think to myself, "I wonder what else I could read on this subject." That thought did not cross my mind after reading this book. It's all here, all the atrocities, all the key figures, the personal stories of victims, the historical context. You won't need to read any more books on the Gulag after reading this one.

This book is a must for readers that like a no-non sense approach to history.Ms Applebaum tells the story of the russian Gulags with integrity and without masquerading the truth.She presents what happens in those Gulags without being to cruel in details.Her book give us a fantastic voyage thru the labor camps in a way that you feel inside the camp. She doesnt leave any stone unturned.You can read about the prisoners,the guards and people in positions of authority.You read what was the sentiment and feelings of those who were captured and sent to these camps.I especially enjoyed the last three chapters which talks about the reaction of the prsioners when they were released and how the russian society received those former prisioners...Kudos to Ms Applebaum for a phenomenal work

The stories of camp survivors that Gulag presents bits and pieces of will stay in my memory for a very long time. This should tell you something of the impact of those stories.

But it is not just the bits and pieces of the memoirs of survivors that make this one a truly worthwhile read. That's just the icing on the cake. What sets Gulag apart is that it is such a well-balanced presentation of everything that had and still has to do with the Gulag prison system. Yes, present sense -- in North Korea the Gulags are still very much in use.

Anne Applebaum will take you from the very beginning of the Gulag to the present. Explain the origins of the Gulag, how people ended up there, and what happened to them if they were lucky enough to get out. Many found out that being released wasn't all that it should be. Often it meant being banned from the major cities and shunned by the citizens who feared associating with a former political prisoner, sometimes this included being shunned by your own children. She will tell you the difference between a political and a criminal prisoner. Show how men and women had quite different ways of dealing with the reality of the Gulag. Tell of harrowing facts concerning children born in the Gulag, but also of hope derived from planning an escape. She will tell you about the guards, who sometimes feared the prisoners more then the prisoners feared them, and the politics that allowed the Gulag to exist. And she'll tell you much and much more. And her writing is such that you are drawn along, page after page.

I found it virtually impossible at times to put the book aside, staying up till deep into the night reading. So, it doesn't surprise me that Gulag won the Pulitzer Prize. It is well deserved. And all I can say is that if you pass up on this one, the loss will be on you.

I cannot possibly add to the dozens of positive reviews already posted here. Applebaum deserves to be commended for her comprehensive and eye-opening study. However, I would like to make one comment about the book: Its greatest strength is, ironically, its greatest weakness. In other words, so thorough and detailed is The Gulag that it frequently leaves the reader feeling exhausted -- literally. Chapter by chapter, we are taken through virtually every conceivable aspect of the Soviet concentration camp system -- prison life, administration, logistics, et al. Quite frankly, Applebaum could have cut the text by 30%, distilled the essence/significance of the deleted sections, and still produced a significant contribution to the literature. Unfortunately, the book's often suffocating verbosity ensures that I do NOT want to read any more on the subject, my curiosity being utterly satiated. The smallest of topics are routinely taken apart ad infinitum. In the end, I cannot say whether the tome would have been better heavily abridged -- or slightly expanded and turned into a definitive, multi-volume study....

The debate over which was worse-- Hitler's regime or Stalin's-- is sterile and often obscene, as it counts the dead by the millions to score partisan points. But as I read Gulag, I found it hard not to think that the Soviet system was the greater horror-- yes, Nazism and the Holocaust were more bloodthirsty, more obviously Satanic, but the compensating factor is that after a certain delay the world roused itself to destroy it. Evil was recognized and stopped, after a while. Where the Gulag, and the state for which the Gulag was merely all principles taken to their logical conclusion, was allowed to run for decades as if it were a rational system--a system which still has its apologists and even admirers.

The central feature of the Gulag is its utter utilitarianism-- if it was easier for wave after wave after prisoners to dig uranium with bare hands and be replaced as they died of radiation poisoning, it was done that way. Unlike with the Nazis, the policy wasn't explicitly to work people to death, but the policies that did exist accepted working them to death as a natural by-product and of no consequence. Academics and undergraduates who think industrial capitalism "dehumanizes" the worker should read this just to see how deeply dehumanizing an industrial system in non-democratic societies can truly become; they simply have no idea. The flip side of all that is that because the Soviet system was so dictatorial, so riddled with fear (it was easy enough for camp officials to become prisoners the next day, and even the reverse was not unknown), it was a completely incompetent and corrupt system incapable of accomplishing even a fraction of what it was supposed to do. Canals were dug at heroic and tragic cost where they were completely unnecessary (and remain unused to this day). Criminal gangs ran the prisons. Children were taken to orphanages and who their parents were was lost in the paperwork. Mass graves were filled with the unknown dead who, given the nature of the frozen tundra, are still being spat up by the ground, preserved but nameless, to this day.

It is impossible to read Gulag and not feel that these horrors were the inevitable consequences of the Soviet system; the gulag was not an aberration of Marxism-Leninism but rather the end to which all its philosophy and practices naturally and inescapably led.

This book underscores the evil that was and still is Communism. In a profound way it also celebrates the human freedom allowed by free-enterprise and capitalism. Communist states rely so much on forcd labor that they ultimately doom themselves to economic stagnation and finally the collapse of their government.

The Gulag system forced production for the state by isolating many of the best and the brightest, the very people who spurred success in the West, in forced labor camps.

This book demonstrates the Hitler's evil was not the only abhorrent system of government in Europe and the introduction shows that Western commplicity is why Communism is still, to this day, not roundly reviled.

An excellent book

In this immensely impressive work by Pulitzer prize winning author Anne Applebaum, we learn of a world eerily distant to us. As Americans, we have been rightly exposed to massive amounts of narrative, scholarly examination, and media views of the Nazi Holocaust. Yet, the decimation, abuse, and inhumanity that characterized the Soviet Union and her Gulag labor system for over 30 years seems to go unnoticed. This is perhaps for political reasons, as it may not serve certain political interests to have a communist nation take her place as the most murderous state in history. This conscious neglect may also stem from the fact that the horror is so distant, having taken place in the often frozen wastes of distant and always mysterious Russia. Whatever the reason, Ms. Applebaum has brilliantly cut through the ignorance on the subject and delivered an earth shattering look at one of the most brutal human institutions ever devised. Expertly weaving together the massive history of the labor system and the government structure that supported it along with the smaller stories from survivors, Applebaum gives the reader the total picture. It is eye opening in its authenticity and gripping in its historical intensity.

The first thing that should strike you about the book is how complex the story itself is. The history of the gulag is not as simple as the highly streamlined and relatively orderly Nazi system. Indeed, in the beginning of gulag development, the Communist justice system was as chaotic as it was cruel. When it became clear to Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders that they would need massive camps to place all their "class enemies", the system was slow to action. In combination with the realization that the wide swaths of mother Russia held massive amounts of natural resources however, the system began to become more orderly. Still, starvation, failure, and misdirection were the orders of the day. Only when Stalin came to power did the camps take on a new role, as a perfect tool for fear and oppression. Along with the NKVD, Stalin used the gulag to not only serve the Soviets economic needs (which it never truly did) but also to serve as the sword of his cult of personality. So many from so many different strata of society were jailed, and many of these people disappeared forever. More deadly than official execution, the gulags became houses of death because of bad working conditions and often barbaric living situations. The gulags developed into a fairly official way to keep the oppressed in line, but they also served to undermine the Soviet Union's national spirit. Even when the system was mostly dismantled soon after the death of Stalin, the gulags served as a bleeding wound to the image of the "worker's paradise".

This book is far beyond simple historical recreation however, it also deals with the human face of the gulag. While numerous and celebrated memoirs have been published in the United States, Applebaum expertly crystallizes these stories and creates a vivid picture of life in the gulag. We read gripping accounts of men, women, and even children ripped out of their ordinary lives and thrown into the vicious cycle that made up the Soviet forced labor system. The horror began at arrest, when the NKVD secret police would knock on the door in the middle of the night. Interrogation and transportation, usually under hellish conditions, added to the desperate condition of those arrested. All of these steps toward eventual internment are described with skillful tribute by Applebaum. Life in the camps was a mixture of terror and hope, as prisoners were forced to improvise in order to survive. New societies grew up in the gulags as more and more were shipped into them. The human form of the gulag was been written before, but never more crisp and readable than in this examination.

There is little praise that I can foist on this already heralded title. Gulag is a tour de force of hidden history, a world distant to us laid bare by the expert words of Ms. Applebaum. Along the way, we see almost every possible aspect of the gulag system, along with its Soviet overlords. The role of the guards and the position of various Soviet leaders and apparatchiks are also highlighted. Of course, Applebaum points out the fact that international outcry was consistently muted because of the political disadvantages of criticizing a communist nation. It is a lesson to be learned, and history not to be forgotten. History on an epic scale, not to be missed.

When American G.I.s arrived at German concentration camps at the end of World War II, Dwight Eisenmhpower ordered camera crews to capture all of it. He said that if not, nobody would believe it, and it would not be remembered. Thus, the Holocaust is memorialized and detailed for history.

Jewish Nazi hunters echo the cry, "Never again," but alas, history does repeat itself. Some might even say it rhymes. International Communism is responsible for the murder of 100 million human beings in roughly 72 years, in the U.S.S.R., China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, East Germany and throughout the Warsaw Pact countries. 12 million died in the Holocaust, 50-60 million in WWII.

Then there are the genocides in Rwanda, Congo, by Idi Amin and other despots, and it all just keeps comin'. Absent camera crews like the ones Ike ordered turned on, it just flies right past our radar. Somehow, Communism is this dinosaur of the Cold War. To call somebody a Communist just has no real bite anymore, whereas to call somebody a Nazi is the worst insult. If we do not wake up and understand that evil exists, then we are doomed to just re-live it over and over again. Until it rhymes.

This a great book that makes the attempt to